People don’t want to accept that about themselves, that they’re part of the general rot, and they react to that angrily, which is a very pure reaction, and it’s good that it happened in a sense. For even the most politicized people here at Duke, they share a common dream, and that dream has to do with finding an interesting profession, a stable job that will allow them to rise on the ladder, a marriage that’s stable and sustains them for a long time, a sheltered kind of environment where they’re protected against not only misfortune, but surprise. There’s that certainty of waking up and knowing that that day’s not going to be different from the day before “” it’s all part of that myth.
And here comes this nut on stage with his Wild Turkey swinging from his hips telling them not only is that image crap, filled with rot and corruption, but it ain’t gonna happen. No matter how much you invest and how many chips you put on the table and how many graduate schools you attend and how many teachers you suck up to and how many unintelligible theses you write, it ain’t gonna happen. Because somewhere at the center of this society something is broken, and it’s not gonna be repaired by dreaming a myth or believing in a myth. When someone presents that kind of truth it’s so incomprehensible it’s really tough to deal with.
–From November, 1974, interview with Bernard Lefkowitz, journalist and visiting Duke professor.
Reporter, ri por ter, n. One who reports; a member of a newspaper staff whose duty it is to give an account of the proceedings of
public meetings and entertainments, collects, information respecting interesting or important events, and the like.–Webster, not a Duke professor or a journalist.
gonzoid specimen number 1
Page Auditorium. October 22, about
nine-thirty. This will be hard.
Leaving with the chaos vibes I kick a paper
airplane that somehow got long-armed to the
back rows and wonder how this will be done.
Cannot find Dean Griffith but talk briefly to
badly shaken Denise Creech in Flowers
Lounge. Leave the poor girl alone.
Deliberately shirk my responsibility to COVER
(the whole) STORY and go with Jane to the CI
where people jokingly console me about
having to resurrect some front page fire from
the ashes of this whiskeyed journalist’s
“speech.” I make notes. My head has been
spinning all evening long from this darvon
Pickens gave me for the eye infection and it
makes the two beers go twice as far, so am
roughly in Hunter’s shape when I get around
to mounting two flights of stairs, open a
closed door that says “Editor” on it. I am not
up to this.
“Where have you been anyway?” David
asks. The bad stare is justified, of course. I
have been fucking around in the Cambridge
Inn instead of transforming myself into the
relentless amphetemined lemming that all
good reporters are. He is used to this kind of
flaming imcompetence on the Chronicle, only
not so carefully planned and executed. Steve
is staring blankly at the floor, thinking,
hopefully, and some Union heavies are
assembled for their official backstage report
to the press. Tried to find Dean Griffith, I
explain, talked to Denise there a little “” uh, hi
Denise “” but mainly went to the CI. Didn’t
want to go into it, really, that dinner at the
pits, my eye, the coffee to kill the darvon, the
speech bummer and now these beers were
making me ill. My eye throbbed and I wanted
to go to bed.
Steve finally lifts his head. “Look, it’s
manageable, it’s manageable. Dan does the
speech story, David, you do the Union side of
it. We’ll run two stories.”
It is 10:30. Leave with my notebook for the
managing editor’s cubby hole to start typing,
pause briefly to notice perhaps for the
hundredth time that magic-markered gem
scribbled over the drinking fountain: ‘The
only dope worth shooting is Nixon.” At least
four years old, it is “” even if half-serious “” a
vestige of the political pretensions the
Chronicle once had or pretended to have.
Maybe they have never been more than nice,
introverted suburban kids exchanging polo
shirts and Bass Weejuns for workshirts and
sandals (but with tweed in the closet), their
cocktail party civility for a little rhetoric, but
they could be very serious people. It was not
just the political tone then, wrought through
tough editorials on everything from the war,
sexism and racism to scum in the garden
pond, but the corresponding energies. At
three in the morning in 1971 I once watched in
horror as the managing editor penned a
steamy half-edit essentially accusing UNC
football coach Bill Dooley of murdering that
player who dropped dead while running
around the track. Something which could
never happen now, the country, Duke
students and so the Chronicle having
“mellowed out.” Everybody but Thompson:
“No one has beaten him as bad as he
deserves, and no one really comprehends
how evil he is. The horror of it all is that he
reflects the rot in all of us.”
I grab a fat stack of eight-and-a-half by
eleven yellow copy paper out of a drawer. Up
at third floor Flowers the stuff is everywhere,
strewn on the floor, tacked up on walls and
slipped into typewriter carriages for memos
between staff people. The first time I used it
was early in 1971 for an article on the new
West campus tennis courts. The piece is
short, not very good and (to let me know this)
crammed under the Spectrum section on
page two. The assistant managing editor that
night was very nice about it, maybe too kind,
since the short messy, poorly worded blurb
would have sent most newspaper vets
screaming down the stairs, doubled up in
hysterics, and into the CI for sanctuary. But he
printed the damn thing anyway…. Along with
the yellow, the mad urgency of the NYT wire
machine though not cacaphonous
chugga-chugga which, being both frantic and
seductive, is the perfect metaphor for
newspaper work. It never stops, and the mind
tends to look back into it as you think and
type. Jane, from whom night editing has
robbed a night’s sleep, suggests some lines.
“Beer cans and an occasional joint passed
among the rows of Page as Thompson…”
Around 11 :00 Harriet from the Tar Heel calls
and asks what’s happening “officially”
between Thompson, his agency and the
Union. Tell her to talk to David or Rick or John
Miller or anyone but me. I am much more
obsessed with capturing on this yellow paper
what happened at something I actually saw
but cannot comprehend. Anne mercifully
shows up with beer and wine, John Miller
stops in. Rick caiis. Spending the day with
Thompson has taken its awful toll, shoving
him to the brink of a minor nervous
breakdown. Terrible, terrible, he moans, the
Doctor started right in by ripping the headrest
of the passenger seat of his Volvo, kept
stopping for beers and jabbering about his
need for “medicine.” Could I lash together a
story on this? Am I even going to attempt if?
he asks.
Yes.
Close to midnight there is another
disturbance. A Chronicle hangout type comes
in to put the mock moves on Jane, half-asleep
over a typewriter. I politely tell this asshole to
go away and shut the door; some screechy
Bitch is croaking for my story so she can go
home. Remember that guy from freshman
year, when we were both new reporters and
he was a YAFer with short hair, a big car and a
rich father? A long-locked “radical” now, he is
still tainted with that garrish piece of Detroit
iron and, like many of these paper people,
tends to choose his women, like the Bitch,
and good buddies from Chroniclites. This
practice inevitably turns up in love affairs,
friendships, cliques, love triangles, frail egos
and much fear and loathing on the Chronicle.
Newspapers tend to breed incestuous
offspring. Many new children die off quickly,
the rest left to carry on comraderies and plot
the editorships, ineptly pimping freshman
reporters for their edit council vote in the
Spring. Very arm-pitsy, so there are many
good reasons not to attend edit council
meetings or go on the retreats. God, drinking
a lot of wine in the woods with a bunch of
Chronicle people has always seemed about as
exciting as playing poker with a bunch of
nuns. “It’s just another place at Duke for boys
and girls to meet other boys and girls,” an
ex-Chronicle heavy once told me. If they
weren’t so damn close socially “” but
professionally instead, he added, the
Chronicle could be a really great college
paper. Maybe so, but at this hour, who cares?
My notes are hard to read, eye hurts. Where
is Thompson now? Never occurred to me to
hunt him down for a statement. Is that
Thompson aficianado Morris getting an
interview, like he said he would, feeding the
Doctor Wild Turkey and stuffing a
microphone in his face? It’s late, and the
repetition of images has no mercy on the
deadened mind. The Thompson movie keeps
attacking, reeling away those jerky
movements and gritty speed-laced squawks
of a whiskey man fished out of a hotel
bathtub, hauled over to Page, and thrown like
meat to the wired gargoyles, restless and
knowing that anyone this tanked up, this
crazy, is easy prey, naked lunch. Those stupid
Union people, they’re responsible for this “” a
very bad set-up, ambush, really. Suggested
column for Friday’s paper:
“Poetic justice and Hunter Thompson
would both insist the person whose idea it
was to cast the journalist in a
podium/stage/lecture setting in Page
Wednesday night be flogged into
unconsciousness, carted out to Hillsboro in a
wagon and stretched in two by sinewy field
beasts, then ground into fine pinkish powder
for snorting purposes…”
Finished at 1:00. I like the story. David’s
been in for thirty minutes and Annie N.
begins to type mine, dutifully checking my
messy copy for errors and suggesting
changes. Cod, forgot about finishing up the
edit pages but, great, Larry has cropped the
Rockefeller picture for the Lewis column,
Ralph, the paste-up man, will do the rest. Do
not worry, these are very competent people
up here tonight. Relax.
1:30. The story is ready. After changing the
pasteup a bit and correcting a few typos we
have a four-column two-deck headline space
to fill “” tastefully. This takes two hours of
rumaging through tired brains. Steve,
evidently, still has a great deal of energy. He is
over there insisting that night editor Zipp’s
suggestion of “Thompson, Crowd Run
Amuck” does not cut the mustard, is not
journalistically or aesthetically pleasing. This
starts people making up weird headlines,
laughing over them. People are giddy. Around
3:00 the right head emerges: “Thompson,
Audience Clash in Page Chaos.” Am amazed
by Steve’s meticulous quest when no one
really cares any longer.
3:00. Walking around, drinking coffee,
doing nothing really. I watch Steve and Zipp
do national news heads and jump pages.
Ralph has gone home, Zipp is about to “” he
has a test in six hours. My body is numb but
the head still a grey circus of the Page Chaos
as I stare at the too-familiar-now words and
pictures people will see tomorrow, while I am
still asleep. Paper goes to Mebane and I to
Buchanan Avenue, exhausted. But there is no
falling off so I read fifty or sixty pages of
Steve’s On the Campaign Trail (all the while
the demon wire machine keeps beating
through me) until the sun comes up and there
is battered, reluctant sleep.
Thompson, audience
clash in Page chaos
By Dan Hull
“Is there any coherence in this thing? I feel like
I’m in a hicking slaughterhouse in Chicago early in
the morning.”
In a pathetic attempt to slide something coherent
through his staccato mumble, Gonzo journalist Dr.
Hunter S. Thompson was met last night at Page
Auditorium with a bevy of jeers, curses, and a
request by the Duke University Union to leave the
stage.
According to Union spokespersons, it was
expected that the slightly inebriated Thompson
would drive away the audience if his talk turned
out particularly monotonous.
Frustrated by the dialogue between the
disjointed speaker and the belligerent audience,
some did leave while others, many of whom were
as well-oiled as Thompson, remained until the
journalist was escorted off the stage.
Beer and joints
Beer cans and an occasional joint passed among
the rows of the auditorium as Thompson, forty
minutes late and looking more like a lanky tourist
than a radical journalist, poked across the stage to
the podium.
Slouching there, Thompson began: “I have no
speech, nothing to say. I feel like a piece of meat,”
referring to his marketing by his lecture agency.
Having tossed aside the index cards on which
were written questions from the audience,
Thompson received few serious oral questions
from the audience.
“What I’d really like to be in is an argimient,” he
said.
When a baby cried Thompson miunbled, “That’s
the most coherent fucking thing I’ve heard all
night.”
In most cases, serious questions and Thompson’s
responses to them were inaudible or incoherent.
Visibly put off by the belligerent Duke audience
whom he repeatedly referred to as “beer hippies,”
Thompson was most relaxed and clear when
talking about Richard Nixon.
“Nobody’s beaten him as bad as he deserves,”
Thompson emphasized. “And nobody really
comprehends how evil he is. The real horror of it
all is that he reflects the rot in all of us.”
“Hell, we elected him. The bastard won by the
greatest majority since George Washington.”
Thompson then urged the audience to “go out
and vote.”
Maintaining that the 1968 Democratic
Convention in Chicago “kicked off an era,”
Thompson recalled somewhat disjointedly that
before going there he took along his motorcycle
helmet left over from his Hell’s Angels days. (In the
sixties he rode with the Angels in order to research
a book on the group).
“After I got there, I found out why I had brought it
with me,” he said.
During the forty minute encounter [he was asked
to leave at about 9:30), Thompson commented
briefly on other subjects.
The 1976 Democratic Presidential candidate:
“Mondale.”
Terry Sanford’s possibly candidacy: “I hope not.”
Gary Hart, the Democratic candidate for Senate
in Colorado “He’ll win, but he’s a sell-out.”
England: “A coal mine in the Atlantic. Next to a
potato farm.”
When asked a serious but largely inaudible
question concerning the rise of consumer politics,
Thompson yanked the shotgun-style microphone
around the podium attempting to focus it in the
direction of the questioner, a good 25 yards away.
“Violence is always sort of a self-satisfying
thing,” he added.
It was at this point, reportedly, that the Union
people began to seriously considered pulling
Thompson from the stage. Asked by someone
whether the Rockefeller family was encouraging
“canabalism in South America,” an incredulous
Thompson tossed up the remainder of his Wild
Turkey onto the velvet curtain behind him, and
scattered the rest of his unused index cards.
Amidst jeering and confusion. Union program
advisor Linda Simmons escorted Thompson off
stage. Afterwards Thompson talked for an hour
with about 100 students in the garden behind Page
Auditorium.
Post mortems on Thompson’s abbreviated Duke
debut varied.
One rather inebriated disciple was overheard
saying, “I thought it was great, anyway. Just great.”
But another student remarked, “I’m totally
embarrassed “” ^for everyone.”
A third student commented, “This was
fantastic “” guerrilla theater, theater of the
absurd “” ^all in one night. Good times at Duke.”
I crutch for those too weak to face up to drugs.